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Gilles De Clerck of The Growth Revolution

Gilles De Clerck

Head Of Growth at The Growth Revolution

Gilles De Clerck grew Salesflare’s MRR by 3900% in a year. He was featured in Josh Fechter’s BAMF Bible, Vin Clancy’s (upcoming, Ace The Game: The 100 Most Powerful Growth Hacks In The World Right Now and Quora’s Top Writer 2018.

He is a Marketing Mentor at EIA Summer Programs. In 2019, Gilles flew thousands of miles in order to mentor young entrepreneurs working on startup ideas in Italy and Hong Kong.

Article

How To Build Your Personal Brand On LinkedIn

These days so much of our lives have migrated online that it’s easy to get lost in all the noise.

As marketers, we need to understand how we can cut through all that to get our message heard.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Gilles’ success

Automation-driven social storytelling from an experimentation mindset

Result if you follow the steps in Gilles’ session

A stronger personal brand on LinkedIn that will boost your profile within your industry and get you in front of new, targeted prospects

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So how do you grow your audience on LinkedIn effectively and with the right people?

Because the first thing I’m going to say is, it’s the rule we’re going to follow. If you want to be only presence and be magnetic, let’s say on social media channels, it’s very important that you keep in mind this one rule.

And that one rule is that the majority of the content you put out has to be relevance to the majority of the audience that the audience that you’re putting it out to.

So this means two things. It’s one, it’s about the content you put out. So I will run you through a couple of tactics. But this is kind of a given. You will have to write content, I won’t tell you what to write. This is about you, about your own value.

And it’s also about the audience you want to attract. There’s been a lot of things about on LinkedIn about how to be vulnerable in your writing and everything. And we’re going to tell you to do that, something else is up to you, what you write. But so that’s one thing, you have to put out content and it has to be relevant to the majority of your audience.

The second part of that is creating your audience. Making sure the right people are in your audience. And the very first key there on LinkedIn is to clean out your LinkedIn connections. We all know these, like a lot of inbound connection invites of people we barely know from all over the world, and it’s just a pain to go through them.

You’re probably accepted a lot of people who shouldn’t be in your audience because they’re not relevant to you. And they’re not possible customers to the product you have. So that’s a very hands on, very tiring and boring trick but clean out your connections list and make sure that there’s just people in there that matter to you.

For example, in my connections, I aim to have as much marketers and innovation managers and founders and CEOs in my audience, the rest I kind of weed out. Then the second part is how do you automatically grow your audience?

Well, I’m going to share my screen for the first time here. So what you see here, doesn’t show well, Liam.

So, LinkedIn is LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which is a feature of LinkedIn premium. You can also have the recruiter. The recruiter one or just the general one. The thing is that especially with the general with the basic one, you will have a lot less filters.

Because those filters are really powerful with these filters. You can target exactly the kind of people that you want in your audience. So for example here, let’s say this is actually a search I saved, we are agency, we’re organizing a conference in a week. And we also want to attract a lot of innovation managers.

So I’ve put up a search here for innovation managers, visit people in innovation, decision makers and innovation in bigger companies. I would have to click this still, in bigger companies, my second hand connections, I can, now basically all visit these profiles, which is the first thing that can work for you because if you visit profiles on LinkedIn, people see it up in the notifications.

This doesn’t work as well as it used to, but it still works, what you also can do, and this is from, for example, something that I did, to market basically our conference to these people, you can start connecting with these people. There’s several tools you can use to do that. The one I use is linked helper.

Now as you can see my license just expired today. I didn’t renew it yet because it doesn’t really matter to show you what it can do.

What I can do here is I can have all, I can collect all of these people, which I cannot do now because licenses expire, but you get the idea, it will collect all the people in here and then you can automatically send these people connection invites.

Do not just send them connection invites do attach a personal note. So a personal note can be something like, Hey, my name is Gilles and the head of growth of the growth revolution and I’m looking to learn from and get in touch with innovation managers in Belgium in the Netherlands. Let’s connect? Gilles.

You’ll be surprised how many people will accept this connection requests in my estimates, it’s between eight and nine out of 10. And from that moment on, those people will be in your network. And they will basically see every type of content you put out and this can be really powerful.

For example, this is a second tip I will give you, every profile you have on social media doesn’t matter if it’s on LinkedIn or somewhere else. Treat it as a landing page, meaning try to maximize your followers back ratio.

Meaning if people go, if people do click on your profile and they land on your profile, it has to have the same effect as a landing page you want them to follow you back. So there’s a couple of things you have to do for that. Make sure you have a lot of endorsements, make sure you have recommendations of cool people, that’s pretty basic stuff.

Take care of your headshots, update your experience, all that kind of stuff. Make sure you have a great header. But then very importantly, this is a very like underestimated feats on LinkedIn, which is your tagline. So you don’t want to miss the growth conference, don’t you?

For a while, like for two months for two weeks, I had something like, organizing the most valuable conference for innovation managers in Belgium. I don’t know exactly what I would have had as a line. But that was basically my tagline. And if then every post they see of you they will see that very tagline. So I aim to write contents about two to three times a week.

And so every time I pop up in those news feeds, they will they will be seeing my tagline. It’s very basic, very easy. The second benefit of this, of having those innovation managers in your target audience of people you want to reach in your target audience, is that they have similar probably a lot of similar people in their own target audience.

And if they start engaging with your posts, the post will get traction and it will be shown also to other relevant people within their network. So this can create kind of a snowball effect.

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